University of Nantes

Université de Nantes-IRCCyN is a joint research unit (UMR 6597) of CNRS associated with Université de Nantes. IRCCyN is composed of about 250 persons. IRCCyN is composed of 13 research groups among which IVC research group (Image and Video Communications) addresses activities in the multimedia communications systems. The IVC group is composed of 35 members (12 professors, 5 research engineers, 18 PhD students). One of the originality of IVC studies relies for more than 20 years on the consideration of the human visual system in the design of image and video services. Towards this goal, three major issues are currently of interest: understanding visual perception, quality of experience assessment, visual attention modeling.

Concerning QoE assessment, IVC is or has been recently involved in several collaborative projects such as the project ITEA HD4U (assessment of HD services), Scalimages from Image and Network cluster (assessment of H264 SVC in HD and mobile scenarios), Futurimages from Image and Network cluster (assessment of new HDR and 3D displays), EQUIMOSE (impact of medical imaging technologies on Quality of diagnosis).

The group has expertise and several testing facilities, including standardized environment to characterize visual performance assessment of 3D services. Specifically it includes several 3D display solutions and set up to exploit them in the context of studies with human observers.